Scaffolding is a necessary attribute when you are building and constructing buildings in practice and in design. Through design practice we use scaffolding to hold ideas, a thought, a method of making, that allows us to engage with the main focus of the project. Scaffolding has many types of operation and activation, as you will discover while reading this issue of Design Ecologies, which focuses on 'architectural scaffolding'. The five articles in this issue offer varied and wide-ranging types of scaffoldings for their projects. It is important to note that these are all practicing designers, mostly in architecture, that are constantly searching for new ways to articulate and communicate their ideas as their projects and practices evolve over time. The patterns of how we use architectural scaffolding in space is a fascinating thing to study, but difficult to visualize – the soaring and swooping doesn't leave a trail, the way a boat does in water. Using time-based methods, we can begin to showcase the patterns of our architectural scaffolding like the faint lines and marks in the construction of a drawing.
This Design Ecologies issue, 'Towards a Transdisciplinary Practice', will focus on how practices consider what is being included and what is not in projects and allow for a reductive design approach and outcome. To consider design as an ecology is a practice fundamentally concerned with understanding the abundance and distribution of all elements involved, which bears on virtually every application of architecture. Can we develop architectures that are intrinsically ecological and transdisciplinary by design through evidence-based practices? Design practices could be considered a mereological condition where the focus of projects is unpacking part-hood relations to the whole, and the relation of the part to the part within the whole. Can we design practices that are whole, inclusive, non-reductive and implicit?
Can we surpass the representational nature of architecture drawing to consider and discuss the agency of architectural drawing in process and result? Over the course of three years from 2019, a cohort of architect–drafters, architect–theoreticians and a curator are meeting every six months in a reflective exchange to discuss the production and exhibition of a collection of drawings and drawing-related artefacts. The varying cast of the bi-annual symposia are participants from the United States, Canada and Europe including Michael Webb, Perry Kulper, Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Mark Dorrian, Arnaud Hendrickx, William Menking, Shaun Murray, Anthony Morey, Mark Smout, Neil Spiller, Natalija (Nada) Subotincic, Mark West, Michael Young and Riet Eeckhout. Surpassing the representational nature of architecture drawing, a group of architects and I consider and discuss the agency of architectural drawing in process and result. Drawing architecture implies materializing an architecture within the drawing, where it can be sought, found and experienced. This refers to an action in the present progressive, an action by the author in the process of bringing into the world through drawing – architectural research through drawing. The artefacts, as drawings, that we are looking at are an end in themselves and not a preparatory means to build an environment as in how drawings are used in architectural practices for buildings. These symposia aim to reveal and come closer to the individual agency of each practice within the drawn discipline of architecture, to establish a way in which we can show this agency in an Exhibition at Montreal Design Centre in August–December 2022. The bi-annual symposium days were structured by round-table conversations and discussions that take place based on drawings or drawing-related artefacts brought in by the participants. In 'Drawing architecture' Session 1 in New York, we had an in-depth introduction of each participant's practice with Michael Webb, Perry Kulper, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Arnaud Hendrickx, William Menking, Shaun Murray, Anthony Morey, Neil Spiller, Natalija (Nada) Subotincic, Mark West, Michael Young and Riet Eeckhout. Participants expanded on their bodies of work, tools and the nature of the drawing practice. For 'Drawing architecture' Session 2 in London, we sharpened the conversation between the participants by: (1) establishing an angle from which we talk through the artefact(s) (drawing or drawing practice-related artefact), each participant from the standpoint of their practice. Angle: Talking through the drawing or drawing practice-related artefact, can you expand on the agency of the drawing (practice) within the discipline of architecture? Questions that might be helpful: (a) How does the drawing work as a tool of investigation (technique of leveraging knowledge). (b) Where and what is the architecture within the resulting drawing/artefact? When is the architecture in the process? Is there architecture within the drawing? (2) By placing the drawing or artefact central during the symposium talk and organize a group conversation around it. It might be that you bring one or more current drawings/artefacts enabling you to expand on the specific drawing practice investigation. The artefact might be resolved or unresolved, finished, ongoing or just starting and in the thick of things. The presence of the drawing allows the group to come closer to and understand the agency of the artefact itself, supported by talking us through and unpacking the artefact.
This article illustrates some typical occupational modalities of drawing by abductive processes, involving the design of ecologies through chance and discovery – perhaps through radical innovations – in architecture. First described by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, abductive processes start with an observation or set of observations, then seek to reach the simplest and most likely conclusion from those observations. To design an ecology is to design a system of parts from things, creating a new kind of contextualism. This may not seem radical nor innovative, but the principle of symbiotically designing an ecology for a range of scaled interventions over time using the same context starts to become interesting. From drawing and sketching what you can see in the actual context for a design proposal, to then redrawing and composing the observational drawing in a studio, to the time taken to experience and reflect on the spaces drawn towards making physical objects from the forms resonating as the drawing develops, many modalities occupy a drawing as architecture. These could be viewed as a form of 'possible worlds', anticipations, opportunities to shape the drawing world and act in it. It could be of help in prefiguring the risks, possibilities and effects of the architect as the editor of situations in the architectural drawing, and in promoting or preventing broad rules of translation. Creating ethics means creating the world and acting in it, in different (real or abstract) situations and problems. In this way, events and situations can be reinvented, either as opportunities or as risks that lead in new directions. The second part of the article describes some of the '26 rules for translation' through drawing related to the design of ecologies through chance and discovery.
Abstract A sea of change is upon us and radical new foundations need to be grown. The time has come for the fundamental need for radical thought with respect to the new paradigms of architecture as we are confronted with political, social and technological disruptions. At stake is nothing less than the opportunity of world-making in which the role of the architect is paramount. Bloomsbury will be one of our sites of exploration, where in 1692, Thomas Slaughter founded Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane, which became the explosively productive haunt and home of artists, architects, designers, players of games, makers and wasters. This was the first of the many radical schools of art to be born within the anarchic lands of Seven Dials and Bloomsbury. The other site will be in Deptford, where for hundreds of years dangerous, infectious, exciting and foreign ideas had landed along its shore, ebbing and flowing with the tide, transforming the City of London. This article will showcase a series of design projects proposed by students of architecture at the Architectural Association and University of Greenwich in relation to sites in Bloomsbury and Deptford in London, respectively. Each contributor has developed a complex set of spatial interrelationships that define their practice and consider art as a spatial language that dissects contemporary society, an architecture that is pre-reflexive, through a radical spatial notational strategy, so as to re-engage with the presence of the past.
Abstract Architecture is a crime if it does not involve environmental DNA and digital forensics to aid in the design of the building. Architectural Forensics in Anonymous Monsters is a chthonic zenoarchaeology that constructs new models of thinking through construction and physical construction with the earth. The anonymous monster could be the alternative contracting/constructing models and ideas that architects consider valuable and inherently fundamental for architecture – the scaffolding of thought and the scaffolding of buildings. This scaffolding could become the anonymous support structure that enables but also underpins the monster under construction. This article is a design project developed to a highly tuned theoretical standpoint on how technology alters consciousness for the individual and for society. With coined phrases such as 'reflexive architecture' to explore the collapse of the biological and information divides whilst has re-applied the term syncretism to explain our experience of multiple realities at once. Technology is a tool and a means for individuals to explore pre-conceptions of themselves, to enter separate realities and bring back information. A computer can therefore be likened to undertaking a similar role to that of a shaman in accessing different levels of consciousness. Building as a constructed reality.
